Our step by step guide to acing your contracting admin

Admin. It’s an inevitable part of the contractor’s life. But the administrative load that’s required of you can be overwhelming. To help you manage your workload and the paperwork that’s required to keep your business going, we’ve created a guide to getting it done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If you work under an umbrella company, you’ve already made your life a lot easier. Your tax and national insurance is taken off your weekly wage, so you don’t have to worry about calculating your tax return, appeasing HMRC or avoiding IR35. You’re also classed as an employee so you won’t be eligible to claim things like travel and food as expenses, which means you don’t have to keep records of everything you’re spending.

If you run a limited company, everything below applies to you. Many contractors hire accountants to manage the bulk of their financials but it’s still important that your records are as clean and well-packaged as possible so they don’t have the task of wrangling your receipts into order.

1. Keeping records from jobs already underway/completed

HMRC requires contractors to keep and archive scrupulous records for a minimum of six years, so you’ll need an auditable system for keeping track of all your expenses, profits and losses.

That’s a lot of paperwork! Obviously, the best way to ensure the safety and accessibility of your records is to keep everything digital. You can use free cloud storage on Google or Dropbox to keep everything indexed and easily recalled but there are also other paid software options available.

The obvious pitfall to avoid is either keeping your records solely on paper, where they can be lost or destroyed, or going to the trouble of digitising everything, only to store all the information solely on your business computer. If your computer broke down or your office was compromised by fire or flood, you’d be a lot of trouble: embrace the cloud.

How to organise your business records

The first thing to do is create a workflow that makes sense to you. Fortunately, there’s never been a better time to be a contractor as there are a wealth of apps and programs designed to make your personal record keeping easier.

Income and Corporation Tax

As your hard-earned money enters your business account, you need to funnel it to the right places. The first thing to do is put aside enough money for tax and national insurance. The rates you pay for these depend on many complex factors, so use a tax calculator, or, even better, consult your accountant as to how much you should be saving.

You have nine months to pay your taxes after your return is filed, so you can factor that into your timeframe. Transfer monies put aside for tax/national insurance/student loans to a business savings account and record the amounts on a cloud-based spreadsheet.

Expenses & VAT

Next, you can take care of any ad hoc business expenses. This could mean purchasing work equipment, like a new laptop, for example. Record all money out, including VAT on products, if you’re registered for it, as you can claim this back. Put all digital receipts in a dedicated folder, separated out into each month of the financial year.

As for your food and travel expenses, you can keep an ongoing digital record of any paper receipts by using an app like Xpenditure, where you can photograph everything on your phone. It even integrates with accounting software like Sage and Xero so it can save you even more time.

Invoices and timesheets

As you send out invoices, you should always keep a copy for yourself, assigning each one a unique PO number so that amounts are easily tracked when you or your accountant are perusing the accounts. You should also keep a spreadsheet that keeps track of each invoice issued and its payment status, so you know which ones you need to chase.

Apps like Invoicely, KashFlow and Quick Books can help you make quick, professional invoices, and, if you opt for a paid service, even assist you with tracking their progress.

If you work away from the client’s office, you will often have to account for your time and a free app like Toggl helps you keep on track and records the precise amount of time you spend on a project.

Assignment contracts and any official documents

Upload these to your cloud storage, filed by date and client for ease of accessibility. If HMRC questions your IR35 status, having these documents easily to hand will help you plead your case more effectively.

Salary

Once all your business expenses have been accounted for, it’s time to pay yourself a salary. Choose a regular payment time and transfer the appropriate amount from your business to your personal account, plus any dividends. Record the precise figures. This process holds true for any subcontractors you employ, although their tax status will determine how in-depth you have to be in your documentation.

2. Keeping track of future opportunities

This step is all about automation. Obviously you’ve signed up to a million jobs boards and are getting email alerts about possible gigs. The key is to be systematic about the way you approach them. If you want to follow-up on a lead either do it immediately or use a system to denote that further action needs to be taken (you can use colour coding, flagging or starring, for example).

Once you’ve gone through all your alerts and worked out your best prospects, it’s time to craft a CV and send it off.

Having applied for your chosen assignments, you can create an alert in your email application or phone to remind you to follow up the next day with the prospective client or agency.

It’s all about getting into a flow: find a gig, apply for the gig, follow up on the gig, close the gig.

Looking for contracting work, like any sales-based business transaction, is purely a numbers game. Persistence is key and good processes underpin persistence. Once you work out your workflow, everything will suddenly be a whole lot smoother.

Privacy Notice

Contractor Supermarket Limited Limited (hereafter called Contractor Supermarket Limited) respects your privacy and will process your data in a fair and lawful way. This privacy notice outlines the way in which Contractor Supermarket Limited collects, processes and shares your data and how long we retain it for.

Where we get our data from We will received your data from:
Directly from you via phone, email or on our website; Introducers; Suppliers; Analytics providers; Advertising networks; Search information providers; Companies house; Electoral register; Land registry and Other publicly available sources.

What we use the information forWe will use the data for:
Providing you with the services that you have requested from ourselves; Marketing and market research; Fraud prevention and processing payments to third parties.

Contractor Supermarket Limited may from time to time use aggregated, or redacted data for any purpose. Although this comes from your personal data it is not considered personal data, as it does not directly or indirectly reveal your identity, and we are free to use this at any time.

Legal basis for processing data

Contractor Supermarket Limited will process personal data for the purposes already stated on one or more of the following legal basis:

Consent – you have consented to us using your personal data by adding your details to our website and reading this privacy notice. You can withdraw consent at any time by directing an email to [email protected];

Contractual obligation– It is necessary for us to process your data to perform the contract between Contractor Supermarket Limited and yourself, or to take any necessary steps at your request prior to entering into this contract;

Legal obligations – we may need to process data in order to fulfil Legal obligations for example audit purposes;

Legitimate interests – we may use your personal data to operate, promote or improve our services or use your data for analytics or in order to protect our business.

Contractor Supermarket Limited will use your data for the purpose for which it was collected, unless we consider that we reasonably need to use it for another reason, if that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we would like to use your data for any other purposes we will notify you and provide explanation as to the legal basis under which we will be able to use your data.

Data retention
Contractor Supermarket Limited will only keep your data:
As long as necessary to fulfil our contractual obligations or As long as necessary to fulfil legal and regulatory obligations

Contractor Supermarket Limited will determine the length of time we can keep your data by considering the above and:

Potential risk from unauthorised use or disclosure; the purposes for which we process your data and If we can achieve the same results some other way without requiring your data

We may anonymise your data allowing us to retain for as long as we wish as it can no longer be associated to yourself.

Transfer of data
Contractor Supermarket Limited ensure that there are adequate jurisdictional data protection regulations in place should your data be transferred outside of the EEA(you will be informed if this is necessary), Your data is currently stored inside the EEA and Contractor Supermarket Limited have data protection policies, procedures and safeguards in place to protect the security of your data.

Your rights You have the right:

To be informed– we will tell you when we collect data what we are going to do with it, primarily through this privacy notice;

Of access – you can contact Contractor Supermarket Limited in righting to request the information that we hold about you;

To Erasure – you can ask for your information to be deleted( this is not an absolute right and will depend on any legal restrictions) We will keep a list of your wish to be deleted to ensure you do not end up in our database again at any future time;

To rectification – you can ask for any information to be amended if it is inaccurate or incomplete;

To restrict processing – tells us to stop processing your data but allows us to keep hold of it for other agreed purposes;

To data portability – to transfer information to another business at your request (most used for instance such as changing bank accounts);

To object – to use of your data for marketing and profiling for marketing purposes. Our Legitimate interests do not outweigh your rights and freedoms, therefore you can cease us processing based on our legitimate interests;

To withdraw consent – you may withdraw consent to the processing of your data at any time, you can withdraw this consent by emailing or calling the following: [email protected], +353 71 932 0877;

To complain – if Contractor Supermarket Limited do not satisfactorily deal with your complaint you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Data Security
Contractor Supermarket Limited take data protection responsibilities very seriously and have ensured that your data is treated fairly, lawfully and with the respect it deserves. Contractor Supermarket Limited have took adequate measures to protect your data from being accidently lost, used, accessed or disclosed in any way that has not been authorised . We have these procedures in place to prevent breaches, however we shall inform you and the relevant regulatory bodies should any data breach occur.